100 million hard drives fail every year. I’ve had my share, including one last Christmas eve.

When was the last time you backed up your notebook? Your home desktop? Your work PC?

500 gigabyte external USB drives are selling for $99 to $129 on sale. That’s enough to back up a notebook and most people’s desktop(s).

My favorite backup software is CMS Products’ BounceBack Professional (www.cmsproducts.com). While Windows has a built in backup program, BB Pro can create a backup drive that can be simply installed to replace a failed drive (obviously you can’t put a 3.5 inch hard drive into a notebook).

What I really like about BB Pro is it’s the ultimate “nagware.” You tell it how often you want to back up and it will nag you to plug in that external drive and do your backups.